Tag Archives: lead generating landing page

The beauty of Marketo landing pages is that a new lesson follows with creating a new page each time owing to a plethora of factors to consider, choices to make, and tools to take into account in the process. Marketo has launched a host of new features and functionalities to its landing page program. What follows are five of the best practices we have followed through years of providing landing page design services for our clients.

1. Which Marketo landing page?

The marketer can choose from three types of landing page options with Marketo:

a. Marketo-Hosted Pages with Marketo-Hosted Forms –

This is one of the best options we recommend to most of our clients based on their marketing objectives, primarily for the ease of use, both in getting started and in maintaining the page. Moreover, these landing pages are easy to repeat and clone with scopes for optimization too.

Another reason why this page is highly recommended is because marketers do not need any support from IT or developer specialists in the ongoing process of maintaining these pages. Another great perk of selecting Marketo-hosted pages with Marketo-hosted forms is that these pages, being dynamic in nature, can vary depending upon whom is the targeted audience visiting the page.

On top of that, the Marketo form associated with the Marketo page can incorporate progressive profiling of the form and social marketing features to improve relations with leads and buyers.

b. Own Website Pages/CMS with Marketo Hosted Forms

For clients who want to maintain the consistency in all of their webpage assets from websites to landing pages, we suggest that they use this configuration for their Marketo landing pages – Marketo hosted forms with their own webpages and CMS. Marketers just need to get the form code, and position it anywhere in the page they want.

One drawback of this option is the clients’ limited accessibility to Marketo’s features and functionalities (except major functionalities) and loss of efficiency to some extent. However, many companies embrace these limitations in order to ensure that website changes are included in their main framework of their website CMS.

c. Custom landing pages

Though this ‘Something Else’ option brings adequate opportunities for customization by incorporating custom coding, it also takes in a considerable amount of campaign time and professional support for creating these pages. If the client wants to make posts on Marketo and some other system, then this Marketo landing page option fits their needs perfectly. However, many times, marketers need to depend on developers and their coding services, which may not turn out as planned by marketers.

2. Landing page templates

After you have chosen the right type of Marketo landing page, you need to decide on the right template. There are two types of Marketo landing page template options you can choose from – the guided landing page or responsive landing page template and free-form templates. The free-form templates come with a drag and drop page editor, whereas the guided/responsive template provides an editor with full-fledged customization options.

3. Get more information from pages

We recommend that our clients leverage hidden fields with their Marketo landing pages, to be able to capture more details on your prospects and leads. Marketo allows capturing various landing pages, more than most users are aware of, including web ads they have clicked to enter the page, key phrases used by visitors while entering the landing page, the search engine where they found your landing page among others. Users can make use of the ‘Click Paths’ option to trace information on these areas as well as the industry they deal in by adding some list of suggested industry names they can click as a navigation. When they click on those specific industries, you can redirect your users to a more personalized landing page for them with the kinds of deals and details they want.

4. Content for landing pages

By content we mean both the textual and the visual content to be used in Marketo landing pages. While graphics or visual content works in enticing your targeted audience, textual content plays a significant role in keeping your leads and prospects engaged with the right information, message, tips on usability of the products or services and personalized offers.

Remember that graphics attract users more to click any link – so make the graphics hyperlinked and add a brief description or image caption to describe the usefulness of the graphic. If you are offering an ebook, whitepaper or case study to download from the landing page, make sure you take the screenshot of the cover page of the gated content that you are offering for download. That way, your visitors will be able to see what the content is about.

At the same time, you should provide enough detail about the content to be downloaded, preferably in bullet points. The more your landing page content can be easily scanned, the more you will be able to give away the copies – webpage visitors have shorter span of attention, the faster they can comprehend the benefits of downloading your content, the faster decision they make. You can also associate the textual content with short video to ease them into consuming your content.

5. Landing page testing

Testing your Marketo landing page is a must, but remember you do not need to spend too much of your resources in testing too much. The main areas where you need to emphasize for testing Marketo landing pages are captions for graphic elements, main headline of the page that serves as the preface of the page to generate interest of visitors, as well as other essential elements such as image size and loading time, form length, call-to-action (CTA) button. Take the test once a week while keeping tabs on the number of conversions that are being generated from the landing page every week.

Do you find these tips useful? In case you need professional support for Marketo landing page creation and optimization, then get in touch with our professionals at (408) 502 6765 or by sharing your requirement below or through our social channels – Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.